$10B Space Telescope Is Beating Expectations

"All of the sleepless nights I've had and the worries I've had, they're all behind us now," NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said after tests confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope is performing even better than expected. Engineers say the "fine phasing" process, which involved aligning 18 hexagonal mirror segments to within nanometers to form one single 21-foot primary mirror, is now complete, and the performance is as good, or better, than the most optimistic predictions, the BBC reports.

"We have fully aligned and focused the telescope on a star, and the performance is beating specifications," NASA engineer Ritva Keski-Kuha said in a statement. "We are excited about what this means for science." Lead engineer Lee Feinberg said images of the test star— 2MASS J17554042+6551277—are amazing. "You not only see the star and the spikes from the diffraction of the star, but you see other stars in the field that are tightly focused, just like we expect, and all sorts of other interesting structure in the background," he said.

The $10 billion space telescope reached its final orbit a million miles from Earth in January. The test images released by NASA demonstrated that it can use its segments as a single mirror. "The images are focused together as finely as the laws of physics allow," said Webb telescope scientist Marshall Perrin," per CNN. NASA officials say that after more alignment steps and preparation of scientific instruments, the telescope will be fully operational this summer and ready for "a very demanding year of science operations." (Last month, the telescope sent back its first selfie.)